Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Next week, on Wednesday, I'll be starting a new feature here at On Ruby, Questions Five Ways. I asked a friend of mine, Andrew Young, to put together a small graphic that I could use for these posts. I really like the way it turned out.

The idea is that I'll invite five different hackers to join a conversation centered around a guiding question. Once we've had a couple of days to kick things around, I'll summarize the discussion and post it here.

Hopefully the discussion won't stop just because I've posted it here. I'd love to see it open up and blossom with a wider audience, so please add your thoughts in the comments each week. If you'd like to follow along at twitter, let's use the #q5w hashtag.

I've got a bunch of questions, and a number of potential victims, err, participants in mind.

Just to whet your appetite, here are a couple of the questions I plan on asking:

What is the right interplay between testing code (unit test and the like) and code analysis (lint, reek, and their ilk)?

What kinds of activities are most important to building (or keeping up) a healthy users group?

I'm sure I don't have a corner on good ideas though. If you'd like to share your requests below, I'll try to work the best of them into the cycle.